Thank you everybody for the suggestions!
I would like to clarify better what kind of data I aim to describe in RDF. I have proceedings documents which are essentially written notes from the parliamentary meetings. In a nutshell, they are documented speeches of members of the parliament. Since all parliamentary meetings have quite strict structure, the proceedings documents implicitly reflect this structure. For example, each meeting has topics (discussed in the meeting); speeches are held at the meeting; the name of the speaker (member of the parliament) is recorded together with her affiliation; the verbal content of the speeches are held within small paragraphs. There are other structural elements like scenes and stage directions. All these structural elements were already extracted from the proceedings by the PoliticalMashup project [2]. So, what we want to do now is really "the next step": explicitly define semantics of these elements and publish the Dutch proceedings as Linked Data.
@Bernard Indeed, with the LOV service, I found quite a few vocabularies to represent governmental data. But most of them provide means to encode different kinds of governmental organizations/agencies (like the Federal Enterprise Architecture Vocabulary [1] ). For now, they will be suitable just for a small bit of my data: political party and a member of the parliament.
There are several vocabularies/ontologies that define the class Proceedings. However, most of they defined specific proceedings, e.g., proceedings of a conference [3], [4], [5], [6]. The Bibliographic Ontology [7] is the one that defines a generic class of proceedings which I can reuse for my purposes. However, I still have to define the rest of the concepts.
@Dan I was not aware of this proposal. The project is definitely similar to PoliticalMashup which data I aim to publish as Linked Data. The effort related to the Italian parliament could be interesting for me as well.
@Bernadette Yes, I am looking for the Linked Data vocabularies about parliamentary proceedings. Thank you for the link to the working group! I will have a closer look at it.
@Pierre Thanks for the hidden resources. They look interesting indeed! I will have a closer look at them. Yes, the SALT vocabulary can be an option if I want to be very generic...
[1] http://vocab.data.gov/def/fea#
[2] http://politicalmashup.nl/
[3] http://data.semanticweb.org/ns/swc/swc_2009-05-09.html#
[4] http://sw-portal.deri.org/ontologies/swportal#
[5] http://ontoware.org/swrc/swrc_v0.3.owl#
[6] http://zeitkunst.org/bibtex/0.2/bibtex.owl#
[7] http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/
Best regards,
Tatiana
________________________________
From: Pierre Andrews [pierre.andrews@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 6:59 PM
To: Tarasova, Tatiana
Cc: eGov W3C
Subject: Re: vocabularies for parliamentary proceedings
Hi,
The govtrack resources pointed out by Dan has some interesting vocabularies, they are a bit hidden though [1]
This page [2] has some interesting resources, even if not really oriented towards interlinked vocabularies, in particular the Akoma XML schema [3].
For representing topics and document annotations, you should check out SKOS (simple Knowledge Organisation System) or commontag [5], probably using the anotea vocabulary to link them to other entities [6] (or other tagging ontologies [7] [8] [9]).
Now, to represent a speech and it's structure, the closest that I know is the SALT vocabulary [10], that provides a Document Structure schema [11] and a rhetorical schema [12]. It says Latex in the name, but really it's document>section>paragraph, so it could be anything.
I don't know of anything particular for speeches though, in the liguistic field (and in natural language processing), they have many annotation schemas for utterances, speech acts, etc. But it seems to be all very adhoc to each dataset and never standardised in a proper schema.
I hope this helps,
Best
Pierre
[1] http://www.govtrack.us/data/rdf/schemas/
[2] http://www.ictparliament.org/node/335
[3] http://www.akomantoso.org/
[4] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/intro
[5] http://www.commontag.org/Home
[6] http://www.w3.org/2000/10/annotation-ns and http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/
[7] http://disi.unitn.it/~knowdive/dataset/delicious/
[8] SCOT, can't find the link for that :s
[9] http://www.holygoat.co.uk/projects/tags/
[10] http://salt.semanticauthoring.org/
[11] http://salt.semanticauthoring.org/ontologies/sdo
[12] http://salt.semanticauthoring.org/ontologies/sro
--
Pierre Andrews, Ph.D.
Research Fellow
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Holm, Jeanne M (1760) <jeanne.m.holm@jpl.nasa.gov<mailto:jeanne.m.holm@jpl.nasa.gov>> wrote:
Dan--
It might be that some of the work behind the new Open States
http://openstates.org/ from Sunlight Foundation would be useful here.
Also useful could be:
Ontologies for eGovernment: http://oegov.org/
W3C Organization Ontology: http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/
--Jeanne
**********************************************************
Jeanne Holm
Evangelist, Data.gov
U.S. General Services Administration
Cell: (818) 434-5037<tel:%28818%29%20434-5037>
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn: JeanneHolm
**********************************************************
On 2/20/13 7:39 AM, "Dan Brickley" <danbri@danbri.org<mailto:danbri@danbri.org>> wrote:
>We've just had this query on the WebSchemas list; does anyone here
>have more pointers?
>
>Dan
>
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org<mailto:danbri@danbri.org>>
>Date: 20 February 2013 15:36
>Subject: Re: vocabularies for parliamentary proceedings
>To: "Tarasova, Tatiana" <T.Tarasova@uva.nl<mailto:T.Tarasova@uva.nl>>
>Cc: "public-vocabs@w3.org<mailto:public-vocabs@w3.org>" <public-vocabs@w3.org<mailto:public-vocabs@w3.org>>
>
>
>On 18 February 2013 16:58, Tarasova, Tatiana <T.Tarasova@uva.nl<mailto:T.Tarasova@uva.nl>> wrote:
>> Dear All,
>>
>> I am looking for the existing vocabularies/ontologies (in English) that
>>can
>> be used to describe the structure of documents of parliamentary
>>proceedings,
>> i.e., written records of parliamentary meetings. For example, I am
>> interested in expressing such concepts as parliamentary proceedings,
>>topics
>> (discussed agenda of the proceedings), speeches inside topics (verbal )
>>and
>> paragraphs that constitute parliamentary speeches.
>>
>> Is anybody aware of such vocabularies? So far I have not found anything
>> specific, only vocabularies that allow to describe structure of generic
>> documents such as [1] or [2] .
>
>I had a quick look and found
>http://cantorva.com/2009NS/twfyl-lod-demo/vocab/ based on searching
>for 'theyworkforyou' (see
>http://www.mysociety.org/projects/theyworkforyou/ ) and 'rdf'. There
>was also a thread ages ago on the FOAF list about describing the
>Italian parliament,
>http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-dev/2008-October/009396.html
>For US, GovTrack might be of interest:
>http://datahub.io/dataset/govtrack
>
>Hope this helps,
>
>Dan
>
>> [1] http://salt.semanticauthoring.org/ontologies/sdo#
>> [2] http://purl.org/spar/doco/Paragraph
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>> Tatiana
>> PhD candidate at Information and Language Processing Systems group
>> http://ilps.science.uva.nl
>> University of Amsterdam
>